When you analyze a subject, you divide it into its parts and then examine one part at a time. If you have taken any chemistry, you probably analyzed water: you separated it into hydrogen and oxygen, its two elements. You’ve heard many a commentator or blogger analyze the news, telling us what made up an event—who participated, where it occurred, what happened. Analyzing a news event may produce results less certain and clear-cut than analyzing a chemical compound, but the principle is similar—to take something apart for the purpose of understanding it better.

Analysis helps readers grasp something complex: they can more readily take it in as a series of bites than one gulp. For this reason, college textbooks do a lot of analyzing: an economics book divides a labor union into its component parts, an anatomy text divides the hand into its bones, muscles, and ligaments. In your papers, you might analyze and explain to readers anything from a contemporary subculture (What social groups make up the homeless population of Los Angeles?) to an ecosystem (What animals, plants, and minerals coexist in a rain forest?). Analysis is so useful that you can apply it in many situations: breaking down the components of a subject to classify them, separating the stages in a process to see how it works, or identifying the possible results of an event to project consequences.

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In Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition (West, 1987), Emily A. Schultz and Robert H. Lavenda briefly but effectively demonstrate by analysis how a metaphor like “the Lord is my shepherd” makes a difficult concept (“the Lord”) easy to understand.

When you plan an analysis, you might label slices in a pielike circle or arrange subdivisions in a list running from smallest to largest or least to most important. Make sure your analysis has a purpose—that it will show something about your subject or tell your readers something they didn’t know before. For example, to show the ethnic composition of New York City, you might divide the city geographically into neighborhoods—Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Yorkville, Chinatown, Little Italy. To explain New York’s social classes, however, you might start with homeless people and work up to the wealthy elite. The way you slice your subject into pieces depends in part on the point you want to make about it—and the point you end up making depends in part on how you’ve sliced it up. You may also find that you have a stronger point to make—that New York City’s social hierarchy is oppressive and unstable, for example.

How can you help readers follow your analysis? Some writers begin by identifying the subdivisions into which they will slice the subject (“The federal government has three branches”). If you name or label each part you mention, define your terms, and clarify with examples, you will also distinguish each part from the others. Finally, transitions, leading readers from one part to the next, help make your essay readable.